Warbirds: Dogfights 2016 recommends you use a flight stick for the best experience (it does help a lot). But what if you don’t own a flight stick? No worries, in this guide I’ll help teach you how to set up your controls to fly with only your keyboard and mouse.

There are a few things you will need to change to make this all work for Warbirds: Dogfights 2016 , and a bit of searching around in the options menu to change the key bindings so that you can play comfortably without moving your hands all over the place. I will assume that the people reading this are right handed, so we will be using the WASD keys for this guide, if you fly and use the mouse with your left hand, then you will need to use the IJKL keys instead to make this work. Let’s get started.

Adjusting The Mouse1. First, start up the game and locate the options menu. Go to the “Mouse sensitivity” options and adjust the controls.

2. Lower the sensitivity down to about 30%. You will need to play around with this a bit to make it work smoothly. I play on a laptop, so if you have a bigger desktop mouse you may need to adjust it accordingly, but for me 30% was enough to fly smoothly without flopping all over the place.

3. I set the Deadband at 20% because it just made it easier for me, but you can leave this as default if you like. I unchecked all the boxes on the left except for the Mouse Control box, I turned that on; it isn’t needed but I liked it on. If you want your mouse wheel to control the throttle you can, but we’ll get to that soon.

4. My primary fire was the left mouse click button to shoot stuff. There you go, you now have your main mouse flight stick controls set up. Let’s now move on to the keyboard.

Adjusting the keyboard controls

1. In options you will need to go to the “Input Mapper”, this will allow you to change your keyboard’s controls.

2. Default view controls have the left, right, up and down arrow keys, as well as the number pad to look around. If you like it how it is than leave it alone and skip to Step 4. I however wasn’t happy with it and needed more control than four directions to see above and behind me.

3. Under the MISC tab, scroll down and locate “Toggle Mouse Look”, choose a button of your choice, I made it Z and cleared the zoom in and out buttons. This will allow you to quickly and freely look around the plane in any direction using the mouse. The default “Right mouse button” toggles your Mouse flight stick controls on and off (controls your plane), just make sure to turn it off so that when you look around you also don’t turn and move your plane. After awhile I became good enough to switch, look around, then turn it off and activate my mouse flight stick again. I also changed the C key to be my “Toggle Gun Sight View” button, so that I could quickly zoom in and out when I needed to scope. The default for this I believe was something like Shift+F4.

4. The default brake button in Warbirds: Dogfights 2016 is Space, I felt that was fine so I left it alone. The throttle on the other hand was a pain to adjust using + and – on my keyboard, so instead I cleared all the buttons on the WASD keys. Clear the Q key as well, that controls your Rudder. Instead, do the following:

W became “Eng on/Throttle up/WEP”.

S became “Throttle down/Eng off”.

This will allow you to quickly and easily adjust your throttle without moving your right hand from the flight stick. If you are left handed just switch those buttons to I and K on your keyboard. I should mention the default button to turn your engine on and off is E in case you need it. Now change the last two buttons to:

A “Left Rudder”.

D “Right Rudder”.

These four buttons and the mouse pretty much gives you complete control over your plane at this point. We’re not done just yet though.

5. I changed the ‘;’ and ” keys (that is Semicolon and quote, near Enter), to Raise and Lower my flaps. You will only need this for landing and taking off most of the time, but it comes in handy.

6. Backspace is to switch between normal guns and rockets, F is your main guns, B is your secondary guns by default. I left them as is. To fire all your main guns is Left mouse button. Change them or leave them, I had no problems with this layout. All other engine, fuel, and flight control adjustments I left as the default buttons.

7. Last but not least, go back to the main Options menu and find “Miscellaneous Settings”. Change the brake speed to 40%. I found that this was enough to slow my plane if I tapped it a few times without tipping my plane over, but it was strong enough to stop me from running into walls.

You can watch my below video that I uploaded to see how the controls work in game. As you can see, I was able to fly pretty much without any problems.

The second video shows me manually taking off, as well as dogfighting combat using nothing but the mouse and keyboard.

That’s about it, you’re now ready to fly in Warbirds: Dogfights 2016 . You should be good to go from here. Just take some time to play around with your mouse Sensitivity a bit so that you can maneuver comfortably without it being too loose or too stiff, eventually you will find the sweet spot to dogfight without any problems. Good luck pilots!

Author: Nick

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Helping provide news, previews, reviews and info on new and upcoming indie titles and mainstream games, Nick’s passion for gaming and eye for detail extends across various genres and styles. Need to contact this author? Use our Contact page.